2007 DST

February 21, 2007

This year, all chaos and mayhem is going to break lose. Well, at least that’s the theory. This year the Government decided to bump the DST from April to March. This isn’t too bad, until you start to think of the impact of all the computers having the wrong time. Fortunately, our fearless developers have produced updates. Microsoft have released a number of updates (details here), though a full patch hasn’t been released for Windows 2000, there is a reg hack.

Then there is linux. Fortunately enough, two of my boxes have already been updated. Those are driven by Debian, and probably got updated as part of a security update that was installed. The unfortunate thing is that two of my boxes are not updated. This is because they are Gentoo, and I have only been deploying security software updates. This didn’t include updates to things like GLIBC which is where the time libraries are deployed from. However, some time during the last 6 months or so, the Gentoo team decided to split time management out of the glibc libraries into their own ebuild called sys-libs/timezone-data. This is good for issues like this, however from a mention on the Gentoo Forums, it may require a certain glibc version that I probably don’t have. So looking around, I found that you can actually do the updates manually. I stumbled across this little gem. The unfortunately issue with this is that the zdump, and zic applications are bundled as part of the sys-libs/timezone-data package. You have to love circular dependencies. Off to find a solution…

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